A tectonic shift has occurred in American politics over the last month, beginning with Chris Rabb’s victory in Pennsylvania and now culminating in New York. The Democratic party has been hit by a leftward tidal wave.
Rabb’s win was a warning shot – a socialist winning in a seat that had been an establishment stronghold. Two weeks later, the left won across Los Angeles. Two weeks after that, the left swept the elections in the District of Columbia. And on Tuesday night, the left dominated New York City in an overwhelming display of force: progressive Brad Lander took out incumbent centrist Dan Goldman, socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier shocked incumbent Adriano Espaillat, and socialist Claire Valdez easily dispatched Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso.
The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) down-ballot slate also swept across the board, taking out four incumbent state legislators. The Democratic electorate has moved radically to the left over the past four years, and this will shape politics this year and for decades to come.
There are a number of factors at play here, many of them long-term, but the magnitude of this shift shows a rapid movement among Democratic primary voters. This is spurred first by the second Trump administration.
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The first Trump administration could be sold to liberal Democratic voters as an aberration, a fluke which could be replaced and forgotten about by the most moderate, electable Democrat. A decade into Trump’s wild ride, it’s clear that the Republican party is permanently radicalized, and that the political norms of American democracy, once broken, cannot easily be remade.
The result is a Democratic base that is far more receptive to challenging Donald Trump aggressively and to policies that represent a rupture from the pre-Trump consensus.
This first became clear with the crowds at Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fight Oligarchy Tour: not the youthful radicals who voted for Sanders overwhelmingly in 2016 and 2020, but the older resistance types who had voted en masse for moderate candidates in the first Trump administration.
This was seen more in the response to Senate Democrats caving multiple times to Trump: huge drops in approval for congressional Democrats and Chuck Schumer specifically. In the first Trump administration, the heroes were the New York Times and the Washington Post; they were the Democratic leaders in Congress. But voters have realized that the answer to Trump is not to reiterate support for the institutions whose failure led to his election, but to build new institutions.
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The second major factor that needs to be mentioned is the impact of Israel’s assault on Gaza and its mass exposure. Democratic voters have turned sharply against Israel – within the Democratic coalition, this is now an 80/20 issue, while the party establishment and elected officials trail, having completely missed the moral outrage felt by the Democratic base and across the political spectrum.
Now, votes for Israel and money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), are massive anvils around any establishment candidate. This is a wedge issue: a clear, hard moral line that most Democratic politicians stand on the opposite side of the vast majority of their voters. This issue propelled, more than any other, the wins of Analilia Mejia, Lander, and Avila Chevalier, by defining them as referendums on Aipac. This is a sea change from two years ago, when Aipac could unseat progressive Democrats, but those races showed that the pro-Israel forces were losing ground.
Democrats are also moving to the left because of a generational shift. Sanders won large margins with Democrats under 35 in 2016. The oldest of those voters are now 45, but still voting the same. Democratic socialism as an ideology came from out of nowhere to be hegemonic among an entire generation of voters, a generation that is now ageing into a majority. The young radicals of 2016 are now members of their parent teacher associations, but they are still just as radical.
Underlying this generational change is a change in urban politics itself. The shift to the left has specifically been concentrated in urban areas: in New York, Washington DC, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and more. Over the last decade, separately from and parallel to changes in the national climate, the left has created a real ideological base in urban areas that are now the governing or opposition faction in most major cities.
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Over the course of a decade of local races, from city council to even smaller ones, the left has built an ideologically tethered base and an organizational infrastructure through DSA chapters that have been winning elections and building a bench to compete outside the core young, dense, renter-heavy, transit-oriented areas.
These local political machines were first able to consolidate in these areas, the lower-hanging fruit districts made up heavily of voters who were radicalized by the Sanders campaigns. But this patient work has scaled up. Socialists can now win citywide in New York with Zohran Mamdani, or DC with Janeese Lewis George, or sweep to an easy first place citywide in Los Angeles with Marissa Roy.
This long-term organizing has moved the left beyond its young, relatively whiter base to be able to win across large majority Black and Latino constituencies that campaigns like the Sanders presidential campaigns could not win in.
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Lastly, the left surge is based on a return to mass politics, specifically, DSA as a democratically run, member-funded organization. For most of the 20th century, politics was based around these kinds of organizations, a real civil society anyone could join and participate in, that offered community and collective decision-making.
The story of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been the atrophying of these organizations: unions, local parties, civic organizations. It’s been replaced by atomized politics decided by cabals of elected officials at the elite level, with no deep roots among the masses.
The most radical thing DSA and the left have done is rebuild this – in a time where politics exists online and on TV, expressed through money rather than organized people. But the result of this was deleterious to our society and politics. It led to Trump.
This sort of mass politics is being rebuilt, however. Nowhere is it clearer than in New York’s seventh congressional district. This was a contest where, on its face, it was a competition between two types of progressives, Valdez of the DSA and Reynoso of the Working Families party (WFP). But WFP represents the old style of progressive politics: funded by grants from big donors, byzantine internally.
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Valdez and DSA wiped him off the map. DSA is a mass organization; in NY-7, it has members on every block, each of them an equal participant in a political organization made up of its members. A left rooted in the masses is a left that is once again muscular, not tied to the whims of donors and constellations of non-profits, but one that reflects the collective will of day-to-day workers.
This is what’s rebuilding the left and beating centrist Democrats up and down the ballot. A return to an old politics of collective struggle. And it’s winning hegemony among large swathes of the Democratic coalition.
After the last month, Democratic leadership should be seriously taking stock of their position. The energy is on their left. The people are on their left. Democrats want fighters, and they want a politics rooted in the collective struggles of the masses, not decided in smoke-filled rooms. We still need moderate Democrats to win those pesky median voters, for now. But the party’s leadership is deeply out of touch with its base. A leftist wave is cresting across the country.
